She's On The Money - MONEY DIARIES: Cutting Ties and Thriving!

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

Today's Money Diarist is the epitome of grace, endurance and quiet personal power. She's nearly 50 and has recently separated from her husband. They were never on the same page when it came to money, which added to the stresses of owning a business together. She took care of HR and accounts working out the budget, which he would then totally overspend on. She wants to share her story of surviving a 10 year marriage, how she got out of a bad situation, and started to thrive again! LinksRelationships Australia Acknowledgement of Country By Natarsha Bamblett aka Queen Acknowledgements. The advice shared on She's On The Money is general in nature and does not consider your individual circumstances. She's On The Money exists purely for educational purposes and should not be relied upon to make an investment or financial decision. If you do choose to buy a financial product, read the PDS, TMD and obtain appropriate financial advice tailored towards your needs.  Victoria Devine and She's On The Money are authorised representatives of Money Sherpa PTY LTD ABN - 321649 27708,  AFSL - 451289.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, my name is Natasha Nabanunga-Bamblett. I'm a proud Yorta Yorta, Kernai, Wolperi and Awadjeri woman. And before we get started on She's on the Money podcast, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land of which this podcast is recorded on Awadjeri country, acknowledging the elders, the ancestors and the next generation coming through. As this podcast is about connecting, empowering, knowledge sharing and the storytelling of you to make a difference for today and lasting impact for tomorrow. Let's get into it. She's on the money. She's on the money.

Hello and welcome to She's On The Money, the podcast for millennials who want financial freedom. Welcome back to another one of my favorite episodes of Money Diaries, where I get the absolute privilege of talking to one of our incredible She's On The Money community members all about their journey. Let's jump straight into it because this week, I got a message and it sounded a little bit like this. Hi, She's On The Money. I'm nearly 50 and recently separated from my husband, and I've now bought him out of our family's shipping container small home. One of the reasons we separated was our very different approach to money, especially as

we owned a business together. I was accounts in HR and would work out the budget, which he would then totally ignore, only to blame me if we didn't have enough money to buy what he wanted. I would love to share my story on how I survived our 10-year marriage and the steps I took to leave myself out of this circumstance. Money Diarist, what a story to share. I'm so excited about this. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. very excited to be here. I am very excited that you're also here. The first question that I always ask on this show is, Money Diarist, how would you grade your money habits if I asked you to grade them from A through to F? I'm sitting between a B minus or a C plus. Can't quite make up my mind on that. All right. Well, you don't have to make up your mind just yet. We can talk about it at the end of the episode. My favorite question though, Money Diarist, can you tell us a little bit more about your money story. Well, both my parents were quite interested in money and where mum worked in accounts, dad went back to study accounting, though he never worked in it.

And they did do a lot of collaborating with the bills and things to check their receipts against their accounts. But it was not something that was discussed with my sister and myself. So it was sort of like something that adults did, not necessarily that children did. They did encourage us to save and we were, we didn't necessarily have a lot of money growing up compared to what I saw some of my friends having, but I know that probably we did have a mum and dad choice to put it into paying off their property, having shares, but I didn't see that. I saw, you know, that I couldn't have the designer top that I wanted.

And, you know, my sister and I used to, we'd get hand-me-downs from Sports Girl when we'd take the label, like the tag at the back, off the Sports Girl top and put it onto a Target top because then we had two tops that we could wear that were like the designer label because, you know, mum wasn't going to go and spend, you know, 60 bucks on a T-shirt when she could buy it from Target for like $14. Absolutely. I'm still like that.

But I feel like the older we get, the less we care about the label. We're like, hmm, young people definitely care about it. Now I'm like, I will gloat to you that this is from Kmart or Target. I will tell you that I've got the best money winning in the entire world. Yes, definitely me now too. I think it made my sister and I quite innovative when it came to how we spent our money and what we did with it. Very cool.

And then what happened as you got a little bit older? I suppose I went to uni, spent a lot of money on my horses, travelled quite a bit. But I suppose I always had an interest in saving and being able to do better. Mum and dad, for my first horse, I bought myself. Well, even just growing up, they told me that I desperately wanted a horse. And they said, well, if I bought the land, they'd buy me the horse. and I think I was in about year two or year three at this stage so religiously from that point I saved for land not really realizing that land is quite a bit more expensive than a horse and then

in high school I sort of worked out that actually I'd saved enough money to buy my own horse and mum and dad were good they actually supported me in doing that over time so I've sort of always had a bit of a saver personality, which maybe we'll delve into later on, is probably one of my downfalls as well. And from one of my trips overseas, my sister was working ski lifts in Canada, so I went over to see her. I decided that I wanted to buy a house. So I came back, I lived at home and bought a house. I saved up the money, got the deposit and went through doing that. Had the house for a little bit and then met my now ex-husband, but my husband.

And listening to my spiel about him at the beginning, I'm like, we had some great times together. You know, we had dreams together. we had. I might get a bit sad about this because it just didn't turn out the way that I planned. And though he can be a bit of an idiot in some ways, there's many good things about him as well. That is so fine. I feel like that's such a relatable story though. Like no one gets married with the hopes that it doesn't work out, right? You get married with all of the hopes and the dreams that this is going to be the happily ever after in the fairy tale. Otherwise you wouldn't

get married, would you? Like you wouldn't go, this is my forever person. And I think the idea that, you know, obviously I actually really like that you've shared that with us because I think that there's this idea that a 10 year marriage is a waste of time if the outcome was bad, but it's not. You had a beautiful journey together. You learned, you grew, you changed together. You probably had so many moments that are life-changing moments together but sometimes just because it was right in the moment doesn't mean that it's right forever yeah and I think that that's a really good story to share as well because it's not a write-off no we were together like 15 years so five years and then got married and yeah we traveled overseas spent two years overseas living the dream

snowboarding mountain biking and it was during that that we talked about starting a business together and you know I came back we got engaged overseas came back got married started the business got pregnant bought other the family of like land that I now own and yeah we had a great time together doing that and ah building the business up from like where it was just him and me to the stage where you know we I'll say we but I mean the business is continuing now without me but we have several employees we have contractors that vision that we had over in Canada you know we actually sought a fulfillment. That's very cool that is very very cool to know that it wasn't just kind of like a pipe dream or something that you talk about one day like it actually happened and

you built it and you proved to yourselves that, yeah, you could do that. So what do you now do for work? Well, despite like, although I was working in this business, I was also my career or my background is in teaching. So I still work. I've just gone back for, I'll say just the last three years I've been back working full time. But previous to that, after having kids, I was working part-time teaching, part-time in the business. Very cool. And let's be a little bit pervy. How much money do you make? I did look this up because I was like, I need to have these answers. So 109,000. And is that including or excluding super? Now that will be excluding super. Oh, very nice. Very, very nice.

So I want to know, obviously life has changed significantly for you, but what are your big money goals now? What are we working towards? What's on the radar? Well, definitely paying off the mortgage or paying it down enough. It's sort of a long-term plan, but I'd really like to build a actual house and not live in a cabin for the rest of my life, which, although it's quite cute, is quite small when I have teenage children. Yeah, that's absolutely fair. I can't imagine how cramped it could become given how many times I argued with my mum

over getting the sink in the bathroom way back when. So I have no doubt you want that to kind of resolve itself sooner rather than later. Yes. Tell me a bit more about, you know, this, I guess, mortgage and what that actually means and how, I guess, that has played into it. Obviously, getting a divorce, things could be really messy or things could be relatively clean cut. How did you make those decisions around,

all right, well, I'm going to pay off this mortgage. I'm going to get the home. What happened with the business? I feel like there's so many questions there that could be really tricky because I can't imagine I own my business, but my husband's not involved. So I know that if something didn't work out, I'd be like, okay, well, this is my business. I'm going to continue to run it but if you run it together that could be a very challenging circumstance right very much so and although it was his skill set that we set the business up around so if you took him out of it the business maybe wouldn't go as well as what it is now and I was you know my skill set is much easier to replace within that so if I suppose we looked at we had equal shares in it and because I

had the house before we got married he did not have a house and he actually didn't have any super when he met me either working for himself that was something that we sort of set up for him as we progressed in our financial journey like getting together and getting married sort of thing we're like right well we need to set this up so I think I just was like well what's fair you know and his time and intellectual property within the business was much more of a percentage than mine so I was like well if he gets the business then in some ways we it was pretty messy but in other ways we wanted to try and keep it as mercy free as possible for our children and that meant keeping them in the family home so that meant me buying him out of the property

so from there I went and saw some counsellors went and saw lawyers and talked to them about what it was and let you know I upskilled myself on what are the possibilities not just taking the first person I spoke to advice and that's something I wanted to share for anyone else that's contemplating it is you know there's so many services out there and for some of them I didn't qualify like I couldn't go because of my income that I earned and because I owned a business a lot of them were like oh that's a little bit tricky we can't help you but have you tried this service or you know what about these guys and I would really encourage people to make the call, ask the questions. And then when I started to go, oh, several people

have told me for our superannuation, the two amounts will be added together and then it's separated. And I had heaps more superannuation than him. I was older, I had a longer working life. So I knew from the get go that I was going to end up losing some of my super to him. But it wasn't so hard to take because I was able to go this is what it is you know normally it works in the female's favor for me it worked the opposite way because I had you know that greater asset but we were also then my lawyers talked about the fact that you know because I had more coming in prior to meeting my ex-husband that it shouldn't be a 50-50 straight split and so having that knowledge and having someone that was able to back me on that is really useful. Yeah. Wow. All

right. Let's go to a really quick break. And on the other side of the break, I want to ask a few more pervy questions, mainly about being on a different financial page and how that played out. Don't go anywhere. All right, Money Diarist, we are back and I have a few more pervy questions up my sleeve. I really want to know, in your letter that you wrote in to us, you said, you know, you would work out the budgets and your ex-husband, he wasn't really a budget kind of guy. How did that play out? Was that something that was an issue the whole relationship or was it something that just when you spoke about the business was an issue or it was only an issue in the later years? Like what did that actually look like? It was probably always an issue from

the point we started to have joint finances and that probably came about when we started to travel together you know you get into a relationship for better or for worse and no one's perfect and so you sort of go well yeah this is his challenge you know I've got as I said before I save money I don't spend he's the spender not the the saver so it was just the the further we got along where it wasn't his money habits weren't allowing us to reach joint goals then he would blame me for not reaching them and when we'd sort of we'd go right well we're going to spend this much on shopping we're going to spend this much on petrol this much on you know our coffees and that and he would then wouldn't follow it but then blame me for not following it it just got pretty

One of the early stories as I was thinking about this, when we were going to travel overseas, he came home one day with an iPod and I'm showing my age here. It was an iPod that we used to have music on, not like phones nowadays. Hey, I had an iPod. You're not that old. Come on. I teach younger kids, primary school age, and they think I am ancient.

Oh, yeah, that's because they're actual children. They don't get it. I'm a millennial not a Gen Z so often I'm not up with it either don't worry and he was like I thought this would be you know good for us to travel with I'm like excellent how much did it cost and he's like oh blah blah blah and then he wanted me to pay half of it and I was like I don't know that I can afford that like this was not a joint discussion you bought it and then to top it off he wouldn't let me put my music on it but I still was meant to pay half of Absolutely not, sir.

Well, I did. But that kind of is a good illustration of where we got a bit stuck and where maybe I wasn't as capable as I am now. Life teaches you these things of setting boundaries with that and knowing that, you know, setting those boundaries early on would have meant that we knew where we stood later on, where it got harder to sort of, you know, go, oh, actually, I wasn't part of that conversation. so why am I then responsible for this? Yeah getting some you know impact from it. Yeah no absolutely. So as you I guess progressed in your relationship and I guess got further towards the

end of it were those things compounding or were you just sick of it or were you just at a point where you were like this is not going to work because to me it feels a little bit when you're saying you would set a budget and then he'd tell you no I'm going to ignore it and then say it was your fault. I'm like, sir, that is textbook gaslighting. I am not okay with that. And I feel like that could be over a really long period of time, really disheartening. You start to really question yourself. Am I good at money? Like I've been setting these budgets and he keeps saying it's my fault. I'm not doing it. Did you start to think that maybe it was you not being good at money or you having the issue when in reality that wasn't the case at all? In my brain, I knew it

wasn't me and I'll say that the behavior that I'm describing was not limited to financial I'm only giving the financial examples but it wasn't limited to yeah of course finances but it wasn't until I was out that I knew well I started to see the damage it had done to my my soul my emotional well-being that I was sort of like I knew he hadn't had the easiest life growing up and so I could forgive him of his faults and I just thought and maybe it's teaching where you see you're always like people can learn people can grow you and I thought that that's what would happen and then over time realizing that it's not happening and there was a couple of moments where the catalyst were where I asked my children to not change their behavior according to

what their dad was doing and I'm like hang on a sec I changed my behavior according to what their dad is doing how can I expect my children not to is this what I want them to grow up with that this is okay in a relationship because it's not okay and I could tell them that it wasn't okay but my words weren't matching my behavior yeah and sometimes actions do really speak louder than words right like you can talk the talk but if you're not walking the walk like I feel people see straight through that yeah especially kids who are tiny parrots who just copy everything that you do, whether they like it or not. Yeah. So what did that, I guess, translate into? So if you were the one who was good at finances, I'd be a bit pervy. What does this mean for the

business he's now running? Because if he's going to not be good at money, I just have a sneaky suspicion that's not the best position for a business owner to be in. No, I believe, I don't know for sure but I believe he has a very good admin person that he has put in place that is she certainly took on the role for me a lot of the bits and pieces that I was doing within the business and she came from a strong money budgeting corporate business so I'm guessing that she was just like yep this is the way it is buddy. Yeah fair I like it and I feel like sometimes you need that non-related kind of party to step in and be like actually this is how it is for them to actually respect it which sucks because we could have had a very different

outcome here sir yes but we are here you mentioned your kids not replicating the behaviors of your husband what do you think your kids attitude towards money is I get worried because I'm forever saying to them we can't afford things we're on a tight budget this you know it's sort I was super conscious of it. We have done the barefoot book. They've done the barefoot steps for families. They've got their little jars. I think they understand it in that sense,

but I do worry that I'm putting my hoarding, we must hoard money, that there's not enough of it onto them. But then maybe that evens out with his, let's spend everything we've got sort of thing. Oh, gosh, that gives me so much anxiety. All right. I want to know, when it comes to investments, do you have any? You mentioned super before.

Can you tell us a little bit more about, I guess, super and any other investments you have? Well, obviously, I have the mortgage on the property at the moment. So it was valued at $650,000 and I've got a mortgage of around the $365,000 on that. My super is sitting at $151,000. Not bad, looking good. Yes, like it obviously took a bit of a dip with what I had to share out to my ex. His was sort of around the under $50,000.

So it certainly was a little bit of a chunk of that went to him. But as I said, that's just the way they sort it out. and it works in favour of some people and not in favour of others. So I'm still pretty happy with it. Shares, I have some perpetual shares. I'm sitting at around $15,000. Oh, where did perpetual come from? I had a financial advisor back before I met my ex-husband

and they started, my grandmother left me, I think it was about a grand when she passed away and then my grandfather left me about 500 and I put them into perpetual shares back I don't know however many years it was and we have added to them when things were good and we stopped adding when things weren't good but that was something that because I started them with money gifted to me from my grandparents my lawyers were like i get to keep them i did have to buy him out of them oh good so yeah that's something that's another one of those little things where i'm

really pleased that i've kept my grandparents legacy there yeah that's really cool and then i've got a very small shares account at 48 dollars oh love love yep and i will thank you for introducing me to that because I wanted to add to my share portfolio but I haven't been able to do the big chunks. From little things big things grow. Yeah I do five dollars a fortnight so you sort of work out how long I've been doing it for from that and just have an automatic I did do some purposeful buying and then I've just automated it and let them choose now. Oh I love that so much. It makes me so happy when people, I guess, share that with me. Not because you're using Sharesies, obviously. I do like the platform, but I think it's just this idea that it's so much

more accessible. Obviously, the perpetual shares have such a higher entry point for you to be able to contribute to them. And if you were adding five bucks every fortnight, you'd be like, maybe this isn't worth it. Like, I can't really see it. There's not that level of transparency. The brokerage fees would be so expensive on that. Whereas $5 on shares is really attainable, really, really accessible. And I think it just makes you feel a little bit more motivated about your journey as well. And it just, you're doing the right thing. You're in the right place. You're taking the right steps to create financial freedom. And I think that's really sexy. All right. I want to know, you mentioned before your mortgage, you have a $650,000 mortgage with

$365,000 owing on it, or that was what your property was worth versus what's owing. Do you have any other debts? I do. I have a car loan that I took over from, so it was in my ex-husband's name. So I took that over from him and there's $33,000 left on that. It could be one of those bad money habits where I'm like, it was a car probably above what I could definitely what I could afford now and it was kind of like a gift of say if you stay with me these are the gifts that I can give you and now you've got the debt for the gift that's

very nice very generous yeah that is sort of during our breakup time but it's been one of those things where I'm just like you know that little bit it makes me feel better about myself and so I have kept it. But it might be one of those things, especially if interest rates on mortgages and electricity bills keep going up, I might have to be realistic about whether I really need it. Yeah, that's fair. I kind of like that you told me that it makes you feel good about yourself because I think that that, especially in circumstances like yours where you said before, you know, your emotional well-being and I'm going to extrapolate that out to your confidence has really been knocked. I think that there are some things that I don't

really care about the financial side of it. Like this is what's making me feel good at the moment and we're aware of it and we're going to keep an eye on it, but like it's helping. And it's, you know, that kind of crutch that I'm going to lean on for the moment so that I can put myself in the best possible position long term, because I think that it's not always just about finance. I think it can also be about your well-being and your happiness and your confidence and just how you feel about the world. Yeah. And I do a lot of driving. Some of those are like country case. And so having a good car that starts, that's comfy, that's economical as well as big cars can be, you know, that is also, you know, part of it. And it's safe to drive my children around in.

Yeah, totally. All right. I want to know, because I feel like you've probably got a few of these up your sleeve. What is your best money habit? Probably a lot of planning. I'll call it budgeting for want of a better word. Every fortnight when I get paid, I sit down and I write down in a little notebook. I have a different one for each financial year. Going and getting the new notebook is really exciting. And the front of it has my long-term goals and where my money flow is going to go and how my cash flow is and you know might list my debts that I've got and I might redo those quarterly but in the back is I look at all my different accounts and I'll list down how what I've got in all of them and then I look at is it

better or worse than last fortnight and then what my net overall position is and it's that idea that from little things big things grow you don't see it from fortnight to fortnight but if I grab a book from last financial year and I look at it and I look at those accounts you can see the difference that you're making oh I love that and you keep them all you don't like get rid of the old ones as the new year comes in no I keep them for seven years for seven years yeah my parents are accountants nope I like it the seven year rule I get it I've got anxiety over the year seven it's all good yeah and then I'll work out what bills I have to pay you know and it may even be my parents lent me some money the other day when I had some cash flow problems

you know and that will go down on there and then I'll list them in hierarchical order you know what's most important to be paid this fortnight down and then sort of track so that you don't miss any and if you have to jiggle them around to go oh this one's got a due date soon better make sure that that one's paid. It just helps me feel like I'm on track instead of like you've thrown up a deck of cards and you're like, oh my goodness, which bill am I going to grab first that I need to pay? Absolutely. Have you always been like this with budgeting or is this something that you've learned over time? I'll go back to that story I told about saving for the land instead of the horse. The second horse I wanted to buy, dad told me if I kept track of my

finances for a year and I could prove to him that I could afford it that I could get a second horse and I think that's where it started to stem from I love this motivation everybody's motivation is so different like if you said to me you can buy a horse I'd be like I do not know what to do with a horse like this is not my jam whereas a horse you budgeted for 12 full months because of this and it's impacted the rest of your life. Yes. I love this. If ever I need advice on how to budget for a horse, I am coming straight to you, my friend, because there is nobody who I would deem more reliable in this space. Well, I would suggest that you don't budget for a horse because they're really expensive creatures. Yeah, look, I've heard that. We've had some horse friends on the show

before and I'm always so shocked at how expensive they are. But I will say horse people are some of the most committed people in the entire world so like if you're into horses like get it clean because that is an expensive habit yes I do want to bring down the mood of the conversation I need to know what do you think is your worst money habit well I've probably alluded to a couple of them I think having horses and kids is probably horses and kids yeah fair I don't have horses I don't have kids yeah definitely worth having it but not financially and then just hobbies and school with kids would definitely add to it maybe a little zip pay account when we were talking about debt so I didn't get to mentioning that whoops I've used it for vet bills and for tires

on my car and it was the only way I could afford to do it because I don't like credit cards and I didn't want to take out a credit card, paying that off would certainly change things. I feel like I like the way you're using that though, because obviously going through a divorce, you're going to have cashflow issues. These are very common things to go through. And if you're using something like ZipPay to actually cashflow vet bills, which are essential, I don't think that's the worst use of the platform. I think the issue is when you go down a slippery slope and people end up spending way beyond

their means on things that they don't necessarily need. And so the thing I really like about these platforms, which, you know, obviously we don't endorse getting them, but if you're in that circumstance where you can't pay your vet bills, what a tool to have to be able to cashflow that, because I guarantee if you're anything like me, you're as obsessed with your pets as I am. And there's absolutely no way I'm not paying for that. Like in that moment, I don't care how much debt I'm taking on because I love my animals so much and that is my priority. So I think it's also very helpful to have a tool that enables you to cash flow stuff like that, which is, you know, essential from my perspective. Yeah. So not the worst thing, not the worst thing at all.

And then maybe coffee and alcohol. Oh, I feel like that apple doesn't fall far from the she's on the money tree. I'm very, very good at a coffee, but I did do the maths the other day. my daily coffee does cost me $1,400 a year. And if I saved $1,400 a year in 10 years, I still can't afford a house. So I will be continuing my coffee addiction. And I hope that that makes you feel a little bit better about it as well. Definitely. So Money Diarist, before I go, I feel like this has been a really special story to share because you're in the position that, you know, a lot of us in our community might actually find ourselves in one day and you shared some really really good tips and tricks about you know not just taking the

first person's advice and making sure that you always know your worth and that you you know set boundaries and put yourself in the best possible position what other advice have you got that the community definitely needs to hear i would do like relationships australia was a has some great resources and they're people that you can speak to on the phone have been really good financially putting some child support in place as to you know how you sort out the timetable how you sort out who's going to pay for what would be definitely a resource I'd recommend listening to podcasts obviously that that was something that really helped me I think I actually wrote down some notes too. Oh, if you need to go get some good counselling, psychology, get a mental health plan,

don't be afraid to do that. I think at one stage I was seeing three different psychologists because they all gave me little different bits that I needed to be able to drag myself through that. Have a tribe, have your friends. You don't have to share everything with them. I think the year that it first started I only shared with two friends I didn't let anyone else know but I wanted to protect him as well and I didn't know if we would stay together through what was going on and people would judge him for what he was doing so I didn't want to share it with people that might then if we stayed together have a different opinion of him so I tried to keep that outside and And I think, you know, if you listen to anything by Brene Brown

and where she talks about the value of trust, it was making sure that the people that I shared it with weren't then going to share it with other people because it wasn't their story to share. But then have the people that my friends that kept inviting me out, even though I burst into tears with them every single time, you know, you need people like that. They're the good friends.

They're the good ones. Yeah. Exactly. And financials, run your numbers, like sit down and work it out. What's it look like now? What's it going to look like on a single wage? What funding is there out there for a single person? And this is, I know this is a female or mainly female audience that we talk to, but it's not just a female story. There are, you know, it does go vice versa. and then take your time but have an end date so I talk about the year that it was all happening and I didn't want to believe it was happening and then the next year was my year that I was like

well it's happened he's not changing his behavior I don't accept his behavior so I had to have a plan for getting out of it and it took me that year to do it and to live and COVID happened in the middle of that as well I had to live with that knowledge and we were presenting a different picture as soon as we stepped out of the house to what was happening behind closed doors but I knew where I wanted to go and I just had an end date and that end date ticked over it was the 31st of December of that year and the next day I was like what now we've got to work on with the process of actually separating yeah wow and then use your tribe in that process as well i think i wrote down there yeah 100 that's when you need the most support yeah i think the only other two things

i wrote down was that in that time live like you already separated so financially wise that if you start to it was something i did when i was saving for the house i put aside the money as if that was my mortgage payment and that became my deposit. And so you then live like, well, I'm going to have to pay an electricity bill and that sort of thing. So that same idea that, hey, I'm going to have to live off a single wage. How is that going to look and actually live it? So you start to, when you muck up, you've still got the two wages to be able to work around and go, oops, going to have to rework that little bit and then journal and budget. I love that. I feel like those are so powerful and I feel like our community is so much richer

having had your story shared in it. It's very, very special that you've wanted to open up with us and I'm so, so grateful. But I'm also a bit confused because at the very start you said, I think I'm a B minus or a C plus. And as much as you've gone through a lot and maybe you're not in the financial position you want to be, like from my perspective, you have so many of the good money habits, like you're doing all the right things, you're budgeting, you're cash flowing, like you're caring about investing. We've spoken about your kid's attitude towards money, which you're heavily impacting. We've talked about the fact that you know that your confidence and your emotional wellbeing were knocked because of this. Like, how do you, do you still think that you're

really a B minus or a C plus? Because I'm not going to lie, my friend, I can't see it. Well, maybe my knowledge is an A, but my effort is a C. Right. Spoken like a true school teacher, too. Yeah, okay. Of all people who should know how to grade efficiently and correctly after all this time, my friend, it should be you. But I do think you should be giving yourself some more credit because I have adored this

story and I feel like there's been so much to have learned from it. I'm so proud that you're a part of our community and that you wanted to share this because I just know that there are going to be people in our community who are going to breathe a sigh of relief at the end of this and they're going to say, oh, at least it's not just me or at least I'm not alone or I'm at the start of this and she's worked it out, so can I. There are just so many people who are going to benefit from this and I'm just so grateful. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you so much for having me on. I have really enjoyed the process and you know sitting down and going through this and thinking about it

it gives you an idea of how how you are traveling i love it thank you so much the advice shared on she's on the money is general in nature and does not consider your individual circumstances she's on the money exists purely for educational purposes and should not be relied upon to make an investment or financial decision. If you do choose to buy a financial product, read the PDS, TMD and obtain appropriate financial advice tailored towards your needs. Victoria Devine and She's On The Money are authorised representatives of Money Sherpa PTY LTD ABN 321 649 27708 AFSL 451 289. Thank you for watching.